Qualitative Assessment of Forest Ecosystem Services: The Stakeholders’ Point of View in Support of Landscape Planning

Abstract

In the last decades, the ecosystem services (ES) concept has become one of the main challenges of study and discussion in the scientific community. The quantitative and qualitative assessment of ES is as a tool to address forest management planning on a local scale. Forest landscape management planning is the most suitable level for integrating social needs and demands in the enhancement of different forest ES. Some regions in Italy have developed forest landscape management plans taking into account the social preferences for the different ES. In this paper, we refer to five case studies in three pilot areas in Italy. A survey collected and analyzed the opinions and preferences, from 362 stakeholders, for ten ES included in three categories (provisioning, regulating and cultural services). The main aim of this study is to understand what type of variables (study area, the groups of interest and socio-demographic characteristics of respondents) most influence stakeholder preferences for ES. The results show that for the sample of stakeholders involved in the survey, the most important ES category is regulating services followed by cultural services. In addition, the results show that the group of stakeholders’ interest is the most important variable influencing their preferences for ES.

How Do Stakeholders Working on the Forest–Water Nexus Perceive Payments for Ecosystem Services?

“…This finding is supported by Calder [57], who stated that the majority of the world's catchment experiments indicate decreased runoff from areas under forests compared to areas under other crops. Cultural services are perceived as the least important category of WES based on pairwise comparison with other categories of WES; this is in contrast with other studies that highlighted that cultural services are considered one of the most relevant ecosystem services category by society [40,53,[58][59][60][61][62].…”

“…This study used an online survey to analyze stakeholder opinions and perceptions towards PES schemes within the framework of COST Action CA15206-PESFOR-W (Forests for Water). Studies have shown that the main aspects of PES schemes are: ecosystem services assessments and their promotion, e.g., [32,41,50,53], which can help achieve environmental and socioeconomic targets with PES schemes, e.g., [50,54,55], and institutional contexts of PES schemes, e.g., [38,39,56].…”

Tourists and Local Stakeholders’ Perception of Ecosystem Services Provided by Summer Farms in the Eastern Italian Alps

“…Finally, the questionnaires proposed to the tourists in two very popular summer farms with agritourism activities allowed us to evaluate their perception (and knowledge) of summer farms and of the associated ecosystem services. The size of the sample of tourists interviewed is adequate to the specific aims of this study, but a larger survey could be proposed to the Autonomous Province of Trento to produce an extensive qualitative assessment of the public perception of summer farms ESs, which might be useful to support rural development policies and to define communication and marketing strategies [58]. The Alps are characterized by very heterogeneous farming systems/value chains, and the application of this multi-actors approach in different areas and at different scales could be used to identify specific opportunities and/or criticalities.…”

Opinions towards the water‐related Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes: The stakeholders’ point of view

“…In the PES schemes design and implementation, several authors have shown that the four main aspects which must be taken into consideration are: i) biophysical assessment and economic evaluation of ecosystem services provided before and after environmental measures (De Meo et al 2018;Börner et al 2017); ii) achieving environmental and socio-economic outcomes of PES schemes (Yang et al 2018; Adhikari and Agrawal 2013); iii) involving landowners and other stakeholders in the decision-making process (Reed et al 2017;Báliková et al 2020); and iv) institutional framework of PES schemes (Matzdorf et al 2013;Vatn 2010).…”